Of course this is not a model of a humorous story, but it will pass muster. It is, however, a very creditable specimen of a story built up, as I have shown, on a very slender foundation. Some humorists would give it an apologetic title, such as “Rural Sarcasm,” or “Aunt Samanthy’s Little Joke,” in order to let the reader down easy.
III.—REVAMPING OLD JOKES.
It often happens that the humorist finds himself unexpectedly called upon for jokes at a moment when he has no ideas about him. Perhaps he is away from his workshop where his tools are kept, or perhaps he has lost the combination of the safe in which his precious ideas are securely locked up. The problem of how to make bricks without straw, and the awful fate of the people who attempted it, stares him in the face. But his keen intelligence comes to his aid. Like the trusty guide in Mayne Reid’s story, he exclaims, “Ha, it is the celebrated joke-root bush, called by the Apaches the ha-ha plant!” and seizing an ancient jest, he tears it from the soil, carefully cleanses the esculent root from its clinging mould, and then proceeds to revamp it for modern use.
The joke should be one that has slowly ripened under the suns of distant climes and other days. It should be perfectly mellow, and care must be taken to remove from it all particles of dust and lichen. Let us suppose, for example, that the joke, divested of all superfluities, presents this appearance:
“A man once gave his friend a very small cup of very old wine, and the friend remarked that it was the smallest thing of its age he had ever seen.”
I have selected this joke because it is one of the oldest of which the world has any record.
The world has known many changes since civilization reached the point that made old wine an appreciated and acknowledged delight to the dwellers in the fertile valley of the Euphrates, and thus threw open the doors for the appearance of this joke. The dust of him who gave and of him who drank the wine are blended together in the soil of that once populous region. Stately sarcophagi mark the last resting-places of many who have enjoyed this ancient bit of merriment. Empires have crumbled since then; mighty rulers have yielded the insignia of their power at the imperative summons of the conqueror of all; yet nothing has interrupted the stately, solemn march of this joke along the corridors of time. It flourished in Byzantium; it lingered in tender caress on each of the seven hills of Rome; when Hannibal led his cohorts across the snow-clad Alps it stepped out from behind a crag and said, “Here we are again!” And the astonished warrior recognized it at once, although it wore a peaked hat and a goitre.
It has awakened laughter among effeminate and refined Athenians as they lay stretched in languid and perfumed ease immediately after the luxurious bath, and about two hundred years before Christ. It has been said that cleanliness is next to godliness, and yet we find that in this instance there was room to slip this joke in between the two, and have two hundred years of space left.